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Friends and Partners (F&P) is an excellent example of the potential the Internet holds for finding, organizing, or exchanging information across a broad spectrum of subjects. Established in January
1994 by Natasha Bulashova in Pushchino, Russia, and Greg Cole in Knoxville, Tennessee, F&P has quickly blossomed into a large and varied
information service for people active in US-NIS projects. A "mirror server" was recently established in Pushchino which will enable users in
the NIS to have much faster access to the information without the relatively
high network traffic costs that they used to have to pay for "foreign"
information.
Friends and Partners is a World Wide Web (WWW) site and uses text, graphics, audio, and, someday soon, video. Like all World Wide Web sites it uses "hypertext links," which, when activated, connect the user to different files on computers all across the Internet.
F&P has also started its own mailing list, to which nearly 700 people already subscribe. Postings to the mailing list are collected and distributed to subscribers every two or three days in the form of a digest. Recent digests have included announcements of conferences to be held in the NIS this summer; suggestions for Cyrillic fonts and readers; news of projects by people travelling to the region; and questions about how to find contacts. The digests also regularly describe new files added to Friends and Partners.
The list of topics under which F&P has collected files is listed below. This list comes from the Friends and Partners' "Home Page," which is the first file users see when they visit the site. Each menu item is a hypertext link to other resources:
Of interest to people in the NIS working in the health field will be the "Health and Medicine" section. This section was created by doing a search on the Internet which resulted in a list of servers (Internet sites) which have health-related files. The list includes hypertext links to servers with a wealth of files in such fields as anesthesiology, oncology, biochemistry, public health, and medical research libraries. The Education section includes a similar listing.
The beauty of these lists is that users in the NIS don't have to spend costly on-line time searching for resources and trying to figure out how to log on to many different computers. Instead, they can just go to Friends and Partners, which has already done the search and provides a gateway to the Internet site appropriate to their needs
To subscribe to the Friends and Partners mailing list you can either select
the appropriate hypertext link from the home page (just after the list of
category topics) or send an e-mail message to:
[email protected]
In the message part of your e-mail form type:
From Russia, users without direct IP access (but with telnet access) can telnet to:
At the login prompt, type: friends. The URL for the mirror server in Puschchino is: http://april.ibpm.serpukhov.su/friends/home.html
and
Natasha Bulashova
Pushchino, Moscow region
E-mail: [email protected]
If you telnet to Friends and Partners you will find yourself using Lynx, a common World Wide Web browser. The commands are very simple:
Space Bar View next page b View previous page Up or Down Arrows Move between hypertext Right Arrow Select highlighted hypertext link Return (same) Select highlighted hypertext link Left Arrow Go back a link
You can e-mail to yourself any document that you open, by pressing P for Print, then selecting "Mail the file to yourself." At the prompt, type your full Internet address and press Return.
For more information or to order a subscription, see our publications page.
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| Center for Civil Society International [email protected] | |